On 9/11, Ani unveiled a new song called House of Fashion. I just put the lyrics up for Ani fans. It’s a beautiful song.

[warning: personal blog entry]

I’m often whimpering to my poor roommate about my lack of dating. His response is typically a reminder that i don’t have time. I’m usually stubborn to this response, arguing that i’ve dated plenty when i’m in more stressful times than this and ones where i’ve slept a lot less and done a lot more. He’s always quite weary of this response.

To spite him, i got this bright idea to start responding to online personals. But then his statement finally hit home. I don’t actually have time to date people that i don’t know. In truth, i’ve never actually “dated” anyone. I’ve had friends or colleagues that became partners through some odd set of circumstances or a foolish idea. I don’t actually know how to meet people and i certainly don’t have time to go through the rigamarole of dating – meeting people you don’t know, seeing if things might work, trying out chemistry, etc. I don’t actually have time to get to know new friend groups or scenes. And i’m not even sure i have interest.

What i want is that magical miracle where someone just instantly fits into my life and i fit into their life and everything just works out. My roommate is definitely right in that i have impossible standards. Yet, i didn’t really realize how unrealistic they were. ::sigh:: So impossible. Gah.

In June 2002, the police say, members of a high-status tribe sexually abused one of Ms. Mukhtaran’s brothers and then covered up their crime by falsely accusing him of having an affair with a high-status woman. The village’s tribal council determined that the suitable punishment for the supposed affair was for high-status men to rape one of the boy’s sisters, so the council sentenced Ms. Mukhtaran to be gang-raped.

….

But instead of killing herself, Ms. Mukhtaran testified against her attackers and propounded the shocking idea that the shame lies in raping, rather than in being raped. The rapists are now on death row, and President Pervez Musharraf presented Ms. Mukhtaran with the equivalent of $8,300 and ordered round-the-clock police protection for her.

from Sentenced to Be Raped

Ethan Zuckerman has some interesting data on the topical coverage of blogs.

There is often a fantasy that blogs will cover more diverse topics than the mainstream media, that they will force the media to cover different topics. Ethan is bothered by the fact that neither mainstream media nor bloggers cover news from less developed regions of the world. So, a research question emerges: in what ways are bloggers expanding the scope of the mainstream media and in what ways are they duplicating it?

One morning in the fall of 2000, i woke up to a message from my ugrad advisor Andy van Dam with the subject “I love you.” I remember scratching my head and wondering if Andy had fallen off of his rocker. [Mind you, Andy is not one to profess his love to anything or anyone, and certainly not in email. His typical message reads: “Pls c me. Tx avd”]

The message appeared blank, with only the subject line (gotta love pine on Solaris boxes) and so i slowly crafted an email to Andy asking if he was OK and if there was anything i needed to do. His response email was a collection of foul words, only making me more concerned about his state of well-being.

As i was crafting a response of confusion, i received four more “I love you” emails. I quickly figured out that a virus was on the loose and i rolled onto the floor laughing imagining everyone in Andy’s addressbook receiving a message that was so-not-Andy. Executives at Microsoft, former students, heads of companies. Apparently, he was apologizing for that one months later. Still, it brought me great joy to get at least one emotional message from him, virus or not.

Given all of this, it brings me great joy to hear of a new exhibit at my Alma Mater entitled I love you [rev.eng]. [Review]

The story seems to go… “Jordan” finds a camera in a NY taxi full of images from the last year. He creates a blogspot blog where he puts photos with commentary. Blog spreads rapidly through blogosphere. Rumor has it that he was threatened with lawsuits, although not from the camera owner. Blog disappears.

This is a fascinating situation because it’s very reminiscent of Sophie Calle’s project (documented in Double Game). She found a black book on the streets of Paris and she decided to interview all of the people in the book about the owner of the book. Every Sunday, she wrote up her interview in a Paris newspaper… until the owner of the book sued her.

I’m curious if anyone knows anything more about Jordan’s experiment… or who Jordan is and how he can be contacted. I’d love to hear the full story.

I love participating as a subject in user studies, focus groups and interviews. This affords me the opportunity to witness social science from an entirely new perspective. Last nite, i had the opportunity to be in a focus group on blogging. The focus group consisted of 5 (technologically savvy) subjects plus the moderator and it took place over AIM. I’ve participated in interviews over AIM and found them incessantly irritating, so i was quite curious to see what would happen in a focus group.

We were all assigned random logins. This meant that no one took the time to personalize them and thus, there were a lot of little AIM men talking. Because i was using iChat, i couldn’t differentiate the AIM men and i found this consistently confusing. [Update: smarter people taught me how to switch to see names because of this post.] Nothing was known of the participants, although aspects of their interests and values emerged through conversation. Of course, the problem was that i couldn’t differentiate the speakers so i’d learn something about one AIM man and not know how to connect it back to that AIM man when the s/he spoke again. Very confusing. Thus, i tried not to model gender or other attributes in my head and just stick to text, line by line. This made it feel very un-focus group-y.

The questions came as fast as they did in the interview and so i found myself scrolling fast trying to keep up. I also found that i did not like the text i was producing. Instead of trying to flesh out nuance, i answered every question as briefly as possible, with lots of information left to interpolation. Still, we were producing so much data that it was hard to keep up. Yet, what was that data worth? I don’t think that i answered any question well or properly contextualized anything. Still, i rambled on with stories and little anecdotes, hoping those would help.

To a certain degree, we bounced things off each other, but group gestures of affirmation and confusion were completely missing. Most everyone was focused on getting their text out as fast as possible.

The result was pretty frustrating. Of course, i think that my experience on that AIM chat mimics one of my subject’s descriptions of blogging better than blogging itself:

“You’re basically standing on a soapbox and reading something out loud only with a blog it feels like there’s a big community square and everyone’s got a soapbox and they’re about the same height and everyone’s reading at the same time.”

I have 741 books in my room. Paper. Almost all used from the beginning. I have obsessively documented them in Excel (although i twitch with excitement over the possibilities every time Marc Smith appears with his little barcode reader/Aura). I love lending my books to people, provided that they follow my neurotic rules (particularly: no removing of any object found inserted into book and please insert some sort of tender love and attention… strawberry jam is fine).

When i started listening to Audible.com, i professed my love and convinced all of my friends that this was the best thing since sliced bread. I rave about a book that i read or tell a friend that they must read it. Then, the inevitable horror comes. They ask, simply and politely, may i borrow it? I turn bright red, lower my eyes and mumble apologies, stammering out that i can’t… that the technology forbids me… that fair use is dead… digital first sale requires that i sell the whole book collection, not just the one… aa files can’t be transferred…

It sucks, really. What the hell is the use of a book that you can’t lend? I’m completely devastated. My role of friendly hub librarian is being destroyed by technology. The joy i give people by lending my books is being replaced by embarrassment. I find myself stifling any speech about the books i read on Audible, not wanting to face the inevitable interaction. Will all the lenders in the world find their positions in the social stratosphere usurped by capitalists?

Why can’t i just have the digital equivalent to my little Excel file that says “lent to XX”? Why can’t i just be forced to re-acquire the book before lending it out again? I do this all the time (or i’m forced to buy a new copy myself… i’m on copy #17 of Stone Butch Blues). I want a lending solution for digital technology damnit!

I find it hard to tell you
Cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It’s a mad world

Incessant repetition is infinitely entertaining for children and sleep-deprived, hallucinating workaholic adults. Thus, it gave me much joy to re-introduce the badgers to my friends this weekend. In turn, they introduced me to the morbidity of salad fingers.

Sometimes, finding absurdity is the only way to cope when life gets peculiar.

CALL FOR PAPERS

FLAIRS-05, Clearwater Beach, Florida, USA
May 16-18, 2005
Special track on
“AI for Social Networks, Social Networks in AI”

You will find at http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~brezil/FLAIRS-05 the presentation of the special track entitled “AI for Social Networks, Social Networks in AI” at the conference of the Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society.

The goal of the Special Track on “AI for Social Networks, Social Networks in AI” is to attempt to fill a gap between AI and Social Networks. We are seeking submissions of papers that describe original results addressing issues such as (but not limited to) the following:

* Where can AI tools bring a new dimension in social networks?
* What needs can we identify in social networks that resonate with AI?
* What AI tools exist for which problems in social networks?
* How studies on social networks can enlighten AI problems?
* Is it an interest for AI-mediated social networks?
* Are there some social-network oriented AI approaches?

Please note that the deadline for submission is October 22, 2004.